Jake Watson

And it's a nice time to mention: from September, I'll be setting up human circuit research with Hospital del Mar in Barcelona. We want to use the amazing opportunity of surgical samples to explore how our own brain works. If you want to discuss ideas/collaborations/anything, lets chat at #FENS2026!!

Interesting to chat with Lluís Amiguet for today’s ‘La Contra‘ in @lavanguardia.com! Gracias!

Our new team studying human circuit function @researchmar.bsky.social is looking for a PhD student! If you or anyone you know would be interested to learn more about this, our plans, previous work, or other positions, visit humancircuits.net or get in touch! #humancircuits

I am very excited to see this work out and so proud of @mictott.bsky.social & @svitlanabach.bsky.social! Study is a great example of moving beyond generating spatial transcriptomics data simply to generate molecular maps, to using the data to answer longstanding questions about human 🧠 organization.

Happy to share the CA3 dataset is published. First large-scale dense connectomics from hippocampus. First connectomic dataset imaged in @princetonneuro.bsky.social. A harbinger of many larger datasets to come (for both). doi.org/10.1038/s415... #hippocampus But my personal favorite is (1/2)

Happy birthday to the greatest Ambassador for Nature that we have. 100 years of teaching us the best reason to protect the natural world - it is incredible and beautiful! www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

New paper from the lab! "Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you are interested in circuit development - Victor Vargas-Barroso‘s thorough work on CA3 is now online. He shows surprising synaptic properties and circuit arrangement in the early postnatal hippocampus! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

To reduce disease, we all need to make some urgent but simple changes to how we feed our garden birds. See our website for the latest guidance: brnw.ch/21x1t4w

If you are interested in systems neuroscience, learning about data analysis, or understanding how the conceptualization of analyses can influence results, join us for the Brainhack satellite event at #FENS2026! More info at: pre-fens-brainhack.github.io/brainhack2026/

"The results are astonishingly clear. On rewilded land, biodiversity surged across the board, with the number of bird species up 261%. The variety of bumblebee and butterfly species more than doubled, their abundance increased over 10x." The cure for nature loss exists. share.google/w30RUdw1902W...

🧠🪰 The adult Drosophila brain connectome now gives us a complete wiring diagram of ~140k neurons. But a wiring diagram alone isn’t understanding. How is this massive network organized? Our paper tackles that question by mapping community structure across the entire fly brain. 1/

🥳Excited to share our latest human multipatch paper, now out in @natneuro.nature.com 🧠 We studied the cellular and synaptic physiology of human L2–3 pyramidal neurons and identified subtype-specific local connectivity rules across individuals. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Join us: penglab.de

Structure and organization of AMPA receptor-TARP complexes in the mammalian cerebellum | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Extremely happy to share our lab’s first paper now published in @NatureSMB! We determined the cryo-EM structures of GluA4, both alone and in complex with TARP2, capturing the receptor in different functional states.

Finding correlates of the same signal in different brain areas is not evidence against specialisation, it is evidence for interconnection. When I flush my toilet, the level in the tank and the flow rate in the supply pipe become perfectly correlated. Yet these toilet areas have distinct functions.

Are you passionate about advancing cutting-edge imaging technologies, and combine expansion microscopy with the power of AI@HHMI to unlock new biological discoveries? If you’re ready for a creative,and impactful journey, we’d love for you to apply! hhmi.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Extern...

If you are interested in a position working on the coolest new developments in connectomics - take a serious look at this. Incredible technology development opportunity, working with a super nice scientist! Check out the paper here if you haven’t seen it yet: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Really beautiful hippocampal connectomics from @zhihaozheng.bsky.social et al. Such high quality data shows many interesting circuit wiring surprises - an incredible resource to digest! Great also to see the parallels with our physiology work on neuronal heterogeneity www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I'm pleased to share our new work, “Spatio-temporal organization of network activity patterns in the hippocampus”, out in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social ! With Demi Brizee & David Dupret, we track how oscillations and spiking behaviour map onto hippocampal layers using an LFP-based embedding. (1/13)

If you are using IVA Cloning for your plasmid work... there is a cool new tool to make primer design very easy: ivaprime.com The explanation paper is here: academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

Incredibly impressive and powerful new method - connectomics with light microscopy! Congrats @mojtabart.bsky.social, Hans Danzl and team @istaresearch.bsky.social ! It works incredibly well - we will keep using this magic, and recommend you do too!

Given all that is going on consider this quote from Bertram Russell's 1930 book The conquest of Happiness: “The man who can be interested in the structure of atoms or the way in which a beetle navigates, is likely to get a joy in life which no amount of success in the pursuit of power can give. ”

Striking insights into the information content of hippocampal subpopulations! A really stunning example of how understanding discrete cell types brings coherence and clarity to complex neuronal activity. Congrats to all

Beautiful and thorough dissection of neuronal heterogeneity! Individual cells matter.

The new issue is out!! 👉 cell.com/cell/current Featuring the engineering of source-sink relations to⁠ create climate-smart crops, how ongoing chromothripsis drives tumor evolution across sarcomas and carcinomas, and the intercellular propagation of pyroptosis! 📷: Jake Watson⁠

Possibly as exciting as the science - our view of.. ‘exploring brain function across species’ made the cover of Cell @cellpress.bsky.social Arranged with local ingredients while walking on Gimsøy, Norway! www.cell.com/cell/current (and paper below)